It is truly exciting to read about your project. I was intimately involved in building a five-county coalition for Regional Initiative for Community Excellence, or RICE, the last major effort in regional collaboration. While reasonably successful, RICE taught several lessons and helped develop insights that I am compelled to share with you. I hope you find them useful.

Engage a broad coalition. At valueideas, we practice our core conviction that innovation happens at the intersection of points of view. It is critical to engage a broad coalition of stakeholders with diverse experiences to create rich and practical solutions.

Elected and political leaders are necessary but not sufficient. Given the nature of our politics and dysfunction at all levels, reliance on the elected officials to lead and deliver value or political clout is increasingly limited.

Vision is not enough. While important, yours will be a “revision” of several developed before you. Commonality of purpose and supporting decision-making infrastructure are the critical needs. Like defining strategic direction in your companies, please focus your energies in developing common goals, strategies, accountabilities, measures that matter, and a pathway from “2025 to 2014” with milestones. Create common playbook that focuses resources and applies ingenuity to design, execute solutions and measure results. If this is your only legacy, you would leave indelible mark on this community for years to come.

Focus on short-term results. It is critical for credibility and momentum. My suggestion, focus on crime, perhaps counter-intuitive for a business group, but crime pervades everything, deeply impacts perceptions and all major decisions. Unaware of your project, I recently met with the Rockford mayor and the police chief and outlined a collaborative model for regional crime prevention and safety. I’ll be happy to share it with you, should you desire.

Be the driver not a catalyst. RICE defined itself as a catalyst, in retrospect, perhaps a fundamental mistake. You need to lead and drive this effort for an extended period of time. Without an overarching mechanism to provide consistent leadership and direction, this initiative will flounder like past efforts.

Sustain effort for three to five years. You must plan to independently sustain and build this effort for at least three, ideally for five years. If your “exit strategy” does not include such commitment, please seriously reconsider. Unlike corporate initiatives, it takes time, patience and persistence to seed and grow such efforts.

Don’t cede control. Resist the urge to merge this effort with other entities or projects too soon and give up control. This is one of the surest ways to fail.

Page 2 of 2 - Don’t fall in love with your process, approach, model, methodology, mentor or best practice. Rarely what you hear or read is the complete reality, we have all been there. So capture good ideas, customize to your situation and solutions rather than replicating someone’s success.

Solutions to the issues exist in the community. Time and again we have relied on external “experts” for solutions, obviously not very successfully. You have to capture ideas that are in people’s heads contextually, apply them to create and execute collaborative solutions.

Above all, execution is a fundamental challenge. It requires trust and consensus for successful implementation. I hope above ideas will help you avoid some pitfalls, increase engagement, collaboration and buy-in of the major stakeholders; and build momentum to improve the probability of your success.

Jay Mathur is the CEO of valueideas and the Center for Business Innovation, specializing in creating and executing innovative solutions for complex challenges in individual business, ecosystems and entire industries.